Author Archives: simon

OpenPGP Key Transition Statement

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I have created a new OpenPGP key 54265e8c and will be transitioning away from my old key. If you have signed my old key, I would appreciate signatures on my new key as well. I have created a transition statement that can be downloaded from https://josefsson.org/key-transition-2014-06-22.txt.

Below is the signed statement.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

OpenPGP Key Transition Statement for Simon Josefsson

I have created a new OpenPGP key and will be transitioning away from
my old key.  The old key has not been compromised and will continue to
be valid for some time, but I prefer all future correspondence to be
encrypted to the new key, and will be making signatures with the new
key going forward.

I would like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust.
This message is signed by both keys to certify the transition.  My new
and old keys are signed by each other.  If you have signed my old key,
I would appreciate signatures on my new key as well, provided that
your signing policy permits that without re-authenticating me.

The old key, which I am transitioning away from, is:

pub   1280R/B565716F 2002-05-05
      Key fingerprint = 0424 D4EE 81A0 E3D1 19C6  F835 EDA2 1E94 B565 716F

The new key, to which I am transitioning, is:

pub   3744R/54265E8C 2014-06-22
      Key fingerprint = 9AA9 BDB1 1BB1 B99A 2128  5A33 0664 A769 5426 5E8C

The entire key may be downloaded from: https://josefsson.org/54265e8c.txt

To fetch the full new key from a public key server using GnuPG, run:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key 54265e8c

If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is
signed by the old one:

  gpg --check-sigs 54265e8c

If you are satisfied that you've got the right key, and the User IDs
match what you expect, I would appreciate it if you would sign my key:

  gpg --sign-key 54265e8c

You can upload your signatures to a public keyserver directly:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --send-key 54265e8c

Or email simon@josefsson.org (possibly encrypted) the output from:

  gpg --armor --export 54265e8c

If you'd like any further verification or have any questions about the
transition please contact me directly.

To verify the integrity of this statement:

  wget -q -O- https://josefsson.org/key-transition-2014-06-22.txt|gpg --verify

/Simon
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)
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=ZaqY
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Creating a small JPEG photo for your OpenPGP key

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I’m in the process of moving to a new OpenPGP key, and I want to include a small JPEG image of myself in it. The OpenPGP specification describes, in section 5.12.1 of RFC 4880, how an OpenPGP packet can contain an JPEG image. Unfortunately the document does not require or suggest any properties of images, nor does it warn about excessively large images. The GnuPG manual helpfully asserts that “Note that a very large JPEG will make for a very large key.”.

Researching this further, it seems that proprietary PGP program suggests 120×144 as the maximum size, although I haven’t found an authoritative source of that information. Looking at the GnuPG code, you can see that it suggests around 240×288 in a string saying “Keeping the image close to 240×288 is a good size to use”. Further, there is a warning displayed if the image is above 6144 bytes saying that “This JPEG is really large”.

I think the 6kb warning point is on the low side today, however without any more researched recommendation of image size, I’m inclined to go for a 6kb 240×288 image. Achieving this was not trivial, I ended up using GIMP to crop an image, resize it to 240×288, and then export it to JPEG. Chosing the relevant parameters during export is the tricky part. First, make sure to select ‘Show preview in image window’ so that you get a file size estimate and a preview of how the photo will look. I found the following settings useful for reducing size:

  • Disable “Save EXIF data”
  • Disable “Save thumbnail”
  • Disable “Save XMP data”
  • Change “Subsampling” from the default “4:4:4 (best quality)” to “4:2:0 (chroma quartered)”.
  • Try enabling only one of “Optimize” and “Progressive”. Sometimes I get best results disabling one and keeping the other enabled, and sometimes the other way around. I have not seen smaller size with both enabled, nor with both disabled.
  • Smooth the picture a bit to reduce pixel effects and size.
  • Change quality setting, I had to reduce it to around 25%.

See screenshot below of the settings windows.

GnuPG photo GIMP settings window

Eventually, I managed to get a photo that I was reasonable happy with. It is 240×288 and is 6048 bytes large.

GnuPG photo for Simon

If anyone has further information, or opinions, on what image sizes makes sense for OpenPGP photos, let me know. Ideas on how to reduce size of JPEG images further without reducing quality as much would be welcome.

Replicant 4.2 on Samsung S3

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Since November 2013 I have been using Replicant on my Samsung S3 as an alternative OS. The experience has been good for everyday use. The limits (due to non-free software components) compared to a “normal” S3 (running vendor ROM or CyanogenMod) is lack of GPS/wifi/bluetooth/NFC/frontcamera functionality — although it is easy to get some of that working again, including GPS, which is nice for my geocaching hobby. The Replicant software is stable for being an Android platform; better than my Nexus 7 (2nd generation) tablet which I got around the same time that runs an unmodified version of Android. The S3 has crashed around ten times in these four months. I’ve lost track of the number of N7 crashes, especially after the upgrade to Android 4.4. I use the N7 significantly less than the S3, reinforcing my impression that Replicant is a stable Android. I have not had any other problem that I couldn’t explain, and have rarely had to reboot the device.

The Replicant project recently released version 4.2 and while I don’t expect the release to resolve any problem for me, I decided it was time to upgrade and learn something new. I initially tried the official ROM images, and later migrated to using my own build of the software (for no particular reason other than that I could).

Before the installation, I wanted to have a full backup of the phone to avoid losing data. I use SMS Backup+ to keep a backup of my call log, SMS and MMS on my own IMAP server. I use oandbackup to take a backup of all software and settings on the phone. I use DAVDroid for my contacts and calendar (using a Radicale server), and reluctantly still use aCal in order to access my Google Calendar (because Google does not implement RFC 5397 properly so it doesn’t work with DAVDroid). Alas all that software is not sufficient for backup purposes, for example photos are still not copied elsewhere. In order to have a complete backup of the phone, I’m using rsync over the android debug bridge (adb). More precisely, I connect the phone using a USB cable, push a rsyncd configuration file, start the rsync daemon on the phone, forward the TCP/IP port, and then launch rsync locally. The following commands are used:

jas@latte:~$ cat rsyncd.conf
address 127.0.0.1
uid = root
gid = root
[root]
path = /
jas@latte:~$ adb push rsyncd.conf /extSdCard/rsyncd.conf
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
0 KB/s (57 bytes in 0.059s)
jas@latte:~$ adb root
jas@latte:~$ adb shell rsync --daemon --no-detach --config=/extSdCard/rsyncd.conf &
jas@latte:~$ adb forward tcp:6010 tcp:873
jas@latte:~$ sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude /dev --exclude /acct --exclude /sys --exclude /proc rsync://localhost:6010/root/ /root/s3-bup/
...

Now feeling safe that I would not lose any data, I remove the SIM card from my phone (to avoid having calls, SMS or cell data interrupt during the installation) and follow the Replicant Samsung S3 installation documentation. Installation was straightforward. I booted up the newly installed ROM and familiarized myself with it. My first reaction was that the graphics felt a bit slower compared to Replicant 4.0, but it is hard to tell for certain.

After installation, I took a quick rsync backup of the freshly installed phone, to have a starting point for future backups. Since my IMAP and CardDav/CalDav servers use certificates signed by CACert I first had to install the CACert trust anchors, to get SMS Backup+ and DAVDroid to connect. For some reason it was not sufficient to add only the root CACert certificate, so I had to add the intermediate CA cert as well. To load the certs, I invoke the following commands, selecting ‘Install from SD Card’ when the menu is invoked (twice).

adb push root.crt /sdcard/
adb shell am start -n "com.android.settings/.Settings\"\$\"SecuritySettingsActivity"
adb push class3.crt /sdcard/
adb shell am start -n "com.android.settings/.Settings\"\$\"SecuritySettingsActivity"

I restore apps with oandbackup, and I select a set of important apps that I want restored with settings preserved, including aCal, K9, Xabber, c:geo, OsmAnd~, NewsBlur, Google Authenticator. I install SMS Backup+ from FDroid separately and configure it, SMS Backup+ doesn’t seem to want to restore anything if the app was restored with settings using oandbackup. I install and configure the DAVdroid account with the server URL, and watch it populate my address book and calendar with information.

After organizing the icons on the launcher screen, and changing the wallpaper, I’m up and running with Replicant 4.2. This upgrade effort took me around two evenings to complete, with around half of the time consumed by exploring different ways to do the rsync backup before I settled on the rsync daemon approach. Compared to the last time, when I spent almost two weeks researching various options and preparing for the install, this felt like a swift process.

Continue reading Replicant 4.2 on Samsung S3→

Necrotizing Fasciitis

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Dear World,

On the morning of December 24th I felt an unusual pain in my left hand between the thumb and forefinger. The pain increased and in the afternoon I got a high fever, at some point above 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degree Fahrenheit. I went to the emergency department and was hospitalized during the night between the 24th and 25th of December. On the afternoon of December 26th I underwent surgery to find out what was happening, and was then diagnosed with Necrotizing Fasciitis (the wikipedia article on NF gives a fair summary), caused by the common streptococcus bacteria (again see wikipedia article on Streptococcus). A popular name for the disease is flesh-eating bacteria. Necrotizing Fasciitis is a rare and aggresive infection, often deadly if left untreated, that can move through the body at speeds of a couple of centimeters per hour.

I have gone through 6 surgeries, leaving wounds all over my left hand and arm. I have felt afraid of what the disease will do to me, anxiety over what will happen in the future, confusion and uncertainty about how a disease like this can exist and that I get the right treatment since so little appears to be known about it. The feeling of loneliness and that nobody is helping, or even can help, has also been present. I have experienced pain. Even though pain is something I’m less afraid of (I have a back problem) compared to other feelings, I needed help from several pain killers. I’ve received normal Paracetamol, stronger NSAID’s (e.g., Ketorolac/Toradol), several Opioid pain-killers including Alfentanil/Rapifen, Tramadol/Tradolan, OxyContin/OxyNorm, and Morphine. After the first and second surgery, nothing helped and I was still screaming with pain and kicking the bed. After the first surgery, I received a local anesthetic (a plexus block). After the second surgery, the doctors did not want to masquerade my pain, because sign of pain indicate further growth of the infection, and I was given the pain-dissociative drug Ketamine/Ketalar and the stress-releasing Clonidine/Catapresan. Once the third surgery removed all of the infection, pain went down, and I experienced many positive feelings. I am very grateful to be alive. I felt a strong sense of inner power when I started to fight back against the decease. I find joy in even the simplest of things, like being able to drink water or seeing trees outside the window. I cried out of happiness when I saw our children’s room full of toys. I have learned many things about the human body, and I am curious by nature so I look forward to learn more. I hope to be able to draw strength from this incident, to help me prioritize better in my life.

My loving wife Åsa has gone through a nightmare as a consequence of my diagnosis. At day she had to cope with daily life taking care of our wonderful 1-year old daughter Ingrid and 3-year old boy Alfred. All three of them had various degrees of strep throat with fever, caused by the same bacteria — and anyone with young kids know how intense that alone can be. She gave me strength over the phone. She kept friends and relatives up to date about what happened, with the phone ringing all the time. She worked to get information out from the hospital about my status, sometimes being rudely treated and just being hanged up on. After a call with the doctor after the third surgery, when the infection had spread from the hand to the upper arm (5cm away from my torso), she started to plan for a life without me.

My last operation were on Thursday January 2nd and I left hospital the same day. I’m writing this on the Saturday of January 4rd, although some details and external links have been added after that. I have regained access to my arm and hand and doing rehab to regain muscle control, while my body is healing. I’m doing relaxation exercises to control pain and relax muscles, and took the last strong drug yesterday. Currently I take antibiotics (more precisely Clindamycin/Dalacin) and the common Paracetamol-based pain-killer Alvedon together with on-demand use of an also common NSAID containing Ibuprofen (Ipren). My wife and I were even out at a restaurant tonight.

Fortunately I was healthy when this started, and with bi-weekly training sessions for the last 2 years I was physically at my strongest peak in my 38 year old life (weighting 78kg or 170lb, height 182cm or 6 feet). I started working out to improve back issues, increase strength, and prepare for getting older. Exercise has never been my thing although I think it is fun to run medium distances (up to 10km).

I want thank everyone who helped me and our family through this, both professionally and personally, but I don’t know where to start. You know who you are. You are the reason I’m alive.

Naturally, I want to focus on getting well and spend time with my family now. I don’t yet know to what extent I will recover, but the prognosis is good. Don’t expect anything from me in the communities and organization that I’m active in (e.g., GNU, Debian, IETF, Yubico). I will come back as energy, time and priorities permits.

Replicant 4.0 on Samsung Galaxy S III

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For the last half-year I have used CyanogenMod on an Nexus 4 as my main phone. Recently the touch functionality stopped working on parts of the display, and the glass on the back has started to crack. It seems modern phones are not built to last. For comparison, before the N4 I used a Nokia N900 for around 3 years without any hardware damages (in my drawer now, still working). A few weeks ago I started looking for a replacement. My experience with CyanogenMod had been good, but the number of proprietary blobs on the N4 concerned me. Finding something better wasn’t easy though, so I’m documenting my experience here.

My requirements were, briefly, that I wanted a phone that I could buy locally that had a free software community around it that produced a stable environment. I have modest requirements for things I wouldn’t give up on: telephony, data connection (3G), email (IMAP+SMTP), chat (XMPP), and a web browser. I like the philosophy and openness around the Firefox OS but the more I have read about it, it seems unlikely that it would deliver what I need today. In particular none of the devices capable of running Firefox OS appealed to me, and the state of email reading seemed unclear. I’m sure I’ll revisit Firefox OS as an alternative for me in the future.

As I had been happy with CyanogenMod, but concerned about its freeness, it felt natural to move on and test the more free software friendly project Replicant. Replicant only supports a small number of devices. After talking with people in the #replicant IRC channel, it seemed the Samsung S3 would be a decent choice for me. The Samsung S2 would have worked as well, but it cost almost as much as the S3 where I looked. Despite the large number of Samsung S3 devices out there, it seems the prices even for used devices are high (around 2500 SEK in Sweden, ~380 USD). I ended up buying a brand new one for 3200 SEK (~500 USD) which felt expensive, especially after recalling the recent $199 sale for Nexus 4. Noticing that brand new Nexus 4 devices are still over 3000 SEK in Sweden comforted me a bit. I would have preferred a more robust phone, like the CAT B15, but the state of free software OSes on them seem unclear and I wanted something stable. So, enough about the background, let’s get started.

Building and installing Replicant on the device was straight forward. I followed the Replicant Samsung S3 Build instructions to build my own images. The only issue I had was that I had not set JAVA_HOME and the defaults were bad; make sure to set JAVA_HOME before building. I built everything on my Lenovo X201 running Debian Wheezy, with OpenJDK 6 as the Java implementation. Installing the newly built firmware was easy, I just followed the installation process documentation. I made sure to take a clockworkmod backup to an external SD card before wiping the old system. To get a really clean new device, I also re-formated /sdcard inside clockworkmod; I noticed there were some traces left of the old system there.

I spent about one week testing various configurations before settling on something I could use daily. A fair amount of time was spent looking into backup and restore options for Android devices. My idea was that I would take a backup of the apps I ran on the N4 and transfer them to the S3. The Android Debug Bridge (adb) has a backup/restore command, however it (intentionally) ignores apps marked as allowBackup=false which a number of apps has. It doesn’t seem possible to override that settings — so much for the freedom to backup your own device. I then discovered oandbackup. It can backup your entire system, saving each app (together with associated data) into a separate directory, for simple review and inspection before restore. You can do batch backups and batch restore. I couldn’t get it to automatically restore things, though, which would be neat for really automated re-installations (there is an open issue about this feature). After noticing that some apps did not like being moved from the N4 (running Android 4.2) to the S3 (running 4.0), I ended up installing most apps from scratch on a freshly installed Replicant. I use oandbackup to the external SD card so that I can quickly restore my phone. For backup/restore of SMS/MMS and Call Log, I use SMS Backup+ against my own IMAP server. Camera pictures are synced manually using adb when I am connected to my laptop.

There is a number of apps that deserve to be mentioned because they are what I use on a daily basis. All of them come via the free software market F-Droid. For email (IMAP/SMTP), I use K-9 Mail which is feature rich but still easy to use. For chat, I use Xabber. I use NewsBlur‘s free software app to read RSS flows. For two-factor authentication, I use Google Authenticator. I haven’t evaluated different PDF viewers, but the first one I tried (APV PDF Viewer) has worked fine so far. Handling a a synchronized address book and calendar deserve its own blog post because it is a challenging topic, but briefly, I’m currently using a combination of aCal and DAVdroid.

Finally, since Replicant is still work in progress, some words about stability and notes on what doesn’t work. This is probably the most interesting part if you are considering running Replicant on an S3 yourself. Overall system stability is flawless, I hadn’t had any crash or problem with the fundamental functionality (telephony, 3G, Camera). People have said graphics feels a bit laggy, but I cannot compare with the stock ROM and it doesn’t get in the way of daily use. First some notes about non-free aspects:

  • Bluetooth doesn’t work by default. After installing /system/vendor/firmware/bcm4334.hcd (MD5 b6207104da0ca4a0b1da66448af7ed4c) pairing and testing with a Bluetooth headset worked fine.
  • Front camera doesn’t work by default. After installing /system/vendor/firmware/fimc_is_fw.bin (MD5 52eeaf0889bc9206860075cd9b7f80b9and) and /system/vendor/firmware/setfile.bin (MD5 0e6fdeb378fb154c39fd508ae28eaf2a) it works. The extensions are *.bin but I don’t believe this code is executed on the main CPU.
  • GPS doesn’t work by default. After installing /system/bin/gpsd (MD5 6757ed2e2a283259e67c62e6b2b9cfef), /system/lib/libsecril-client.so (MD5 a836df0f947d2aa2ef20dcb213317517), /system/lib/hw/gps.exynos4.so (MD5 1ea1d67f297dd52d59d40dbad9b02a0a) it works. This is code that runs on the main CPU, and even more alarming, it embeds a copy of OpenSSL and talks to various online servers for A-GPS, and is thus a likely (and probably not too challenging) attack vector for anyone wanting to remotely exploit any phone.
  • Wifi doesn’t work, and I haven’t gotten this to work. There is a list of non-free S3 firmware on the Replicant wiki however my stock ROM did not ship with those files. I don’t believe any of the blobs run on the main CPU.
  • NFC doesn’t work, and I haven’t gotten it to work. It seems the infrastructure for NFC is missing in Replicant 4.0, it doesn’t even expose the NFC hardware permission capability. This is quite unfortunate for me, since I daily work with YubiKey NEO and would have preferred to replace Google Authenticator with the YubiOATH that uses the NEO for OATH secret storage.

Some other observations:

  • Panorama mode in the Camera crashes; see issue about it.
  • There is a number of smaller graphical issues. I believe these are related to the EGL but haven’t understood the details. What I’ve noticed are the following issues. The task switcher doesn’t show mini screenshots of all running apps (the screenshots are just black). ZXing is not able to QR decode images (I’m told this is because Replicant uses a RGB color plane instead of the required YUV color plane). Video playback in the gallery is laggy to the point of being unusable. Video playback on Youtube in the default web browser works in full screen (not laggy), but not embedded in the webpage.
  • MTP has been a bit unreliable, my main laptop is able to import photos, but another laptop (also running Debian Wheezy) just stalls when talking to it. This may be a host issue, I have experience similar issues with a Nexus 7 2nd generation device.

I am quite happy with the setup so far, and I will continue to use it as my primary phone.